Sockets as a module or a separate PHP CLI instance?

I need to do some socket work on a production machine that is constantly busy so I don't dare re-compile php. Anybody know if it's possible to load the socket functions dynamically, maybe as if they were in a module? Alternatively, would it be possible to compile PHP without apache and with sockets for command line use only? If I do that I would like to give the resulting object a different name than PHP because I do have some cmd line pgms running on the machine. Is that difficult? Tx, Paul W